Book Review: The Walls Around Us

I kept wanting this book to be rooted in reality and it’s just not. That made me angry. If you want to enjoy this book, you have to be able to accept that the ending could never have happened and then just appreciate it for its dreamlike quality.

Basically Amber is stuck in juvie…maybe guilty of murder, maybe not. She loves to read and quietly profiles all her fellow inmates. Violet, meanwhile, is a prima ballerina about to go to Julliard but has never gotten over the loss of her best friend, Ori. Ori was sent to the same detention center as Amber for brutally stabbing fellow ballerinas but shortly after her arrival, all inmates are simultaneously poisoned and die. As the before and after parts of the story merge, you begin to reassess each character’s guilt.